Syndication

Being aware of death influences our money behavior. The research about this behavior is intriguing and instructional—and very important to understand for those of us who work with clients and their money. As a quick and partial overview of what researchers have learned, read "Grim Givers: How Thoughts of Death Open Wallets" (New York Observer). Excerpt:

Yet we humans are practical animals. When confronted with the terrifying vision of our own expiration date, we get to work. We create meaning in our lives by reinforcing our cultural values, erecting buildings, making art, teaching—and writing charitable checks.

There’s even a hypothesis for this. With the alarming name Terror Management Theory, it’s the brainchild of academics Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszczynski, who’ve been investigating it for over 25 years.

The idea—set out in their forthcoming book, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life—is that knowledge of our own death (“mortality salience,” as it’s known) is a powerful force shaping our actions, behaviors and beliefs.

This season often brings with it memories fond to hard, and glad to sad. Did you know that nostalgia is a focus of much research? And that it has many benefits? Enjoy or at least value those thoughts of the past; they are not a waste of time. From "Holiday nostalgia: Why it's good to relive memories" (Eureka Times-Standard):

While nostalgia may involve looking backward, "metaphorically speaking, it is a torch to light the road ahead," [Tim] Wildschut says. "It entails information about what matters in life, what is valuable, what is meaningful."

Nostalgia is a self-conscious, bittersweet but predominantly positive and fundamentally social emotion. It arises from fond memories mixed with yearning about one's child- hood, close relationships, or atypically positive events, and it entails a redemption trajectory. It is triggered by a variety of external stimuli or internal states, is prevalent, is universal, and is experienced across ages. Nostalgia serves a self-oriented function (by raising self-positivity and facilitating perceptions of a positive future), an existential function (by increasing perceptions of life as meaningful), and a sociality function (by increasing social connectedness, reinforcing socially oriented action tendencies, and promoting prosocial behavior). These functions are independent of the positive affect that nostalgia may incite. Also, nostalgia-elicited sociality often mediates the self-positivity and existential functions. In addition, nostalgia maintains psychological and physiological homeostasis along the following regulatory cycle: (i) Noxious stimuli, as general as avoidance motivation and as specific as self-threat (negative performance feedback), existential threat (meaninglessness, mortality awareness), social threat (loneliness, social exclusion), well-being threat (stress, boredom), or, perhaps surprisingly, physical coldness intensify felt nostalgia; (ii) in turn, nostalgia (measured or manipulated) alleviates the impact of threat by curtailing the influence of avoidance motivation on approach motivation, buttressing the self from threat, limiting defensive responding to meaninglessness, assuaging existential anxiety, repairing interpersonal isolation, diminishing the blow of stress, relieving boredom through meaning reestablishment, or producing the sensation of physical warmth. Nostalgia has a checkered history, but is now rehabilitated as an adaptive psychological resource.

The journal article probably contains all you would want to know about nostalgia—and possibly much more. Have you been experiencing any nostalgia this season? Did you know that simple activity of thought and feeling has been the subject of so much research? Beginning today, Winter Solstice, I plan to conduct my own small, informal experiment: watching when I find myself nostalgic and observing my responses. Join me?

If you teach or train, this might be a good essay to read. The author includes five lessons she learned from not excelling in a class, the last of which I quote below. What do you think?

Write a new personal narrative.For me, one of the most empowering outcomes of my year of climbing has been the new narrative I can tell about myself. I am no longer “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, and Wikipedian”. I am now “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedian, and rock climber”. This was brought home most vividly to me one day when I was climbing outdoors here in Los Angeles and people on the beach were marveling at those of us climbing. Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience - that radical switch and growth. It is an enormous goal and I would love to hear how others work at achieving it with their students.

Have you heard the parable about truths and facts trying to get heard and being ignored? In the second part of the tale, story comes along: she takes the same information, wraps it in a narrative and is heard. There are many versions of this story, but in all of them story shows fact how to become interesting and welcomed. Click to listen to one version. Read other versions here and here.

Perhaps you have experienced not being able to get your point across no matter how important and accurate. There's a good chance that using a story may increase the chances people will listen. In addition to what we are learning about narrative transportation (how people's attitudes and behaviors may change when engrossed in a story), other research too indicates that using a story to persuade may be wise. In one study (details here), a group of physicians were given clinical guidelines and another group of doctors were given the same information but in the form of a story.

After an hour, researchers asked the doctors to share what they remembered.

"The results were really astonishing," said [Austin] Kilaru. "The level of recall for people who had just read the guideline itself was really quite low. It got to the point where people were making up guidelines because they knew they were supposed to remember something."

...

"What we find over and over and over is that these stories are really powerful for the brain," said Hasson. "They evoke strong responses in many different parts of the brain that are highly reliable."

Hasson looks at what happens inside our brains when we hear a story - one that we can relate to. He finds that stories activate parts of the brain associated with memory and which are not as active when we hear information that is easier to "tune out."

If you read print or online media these days, or any of a whole slew of business and self-help books about story, you will know this method of communication is a topic of much interest. In fact, it may have gotten so much coverage that the communicate-with-stories topic is almost cliche, sometimes even boring. I guess someone needs to write some stories so we begin to pay attention to the topic of stories again! Because of the heavy focus on story, many people are becoming story-leery (although not story-proof). They may feel that a story is being told to get them to do something.

So just make sure your story is worth a listen. Doing so is not that difficult. Don't most of us tell worthy stories everyday and without much effort? For some excellent tips, listen to this short four-part series from Ira Glass; they start here.

If you believe as I do that a mindful mediator is a more effective mediator—both because of his or her adept ability to utilize conflict resolution skills but more importantly because of the direct effect he or she has on the parties' affect (i.e., mood)—then I have a suggested program for you below.

No surprise to any of you who read my blogs: I think the reflectiveness, the mindfulness, of the mediator is significant, sometimes paramount, in the resolving of disputes. That mindfulness state is what in my opinion moves a dispute professional from adequate to excellent, to one who serves clients in a manner that is outstanding.

Because I think both play and self-knowledge can enhance our mindfulness, I am recommending a workshop to you. It's being taught September 18-21, by Doctors Bonnie Badenoch and Theresa Kestly in the artist and farmland community of Corrales, New Mexico, near the Rio Grande River. Click for all the details and to register. I have taken two seminars from Bonnie in the past, read two of her books which I recommend frequently, and believe she is gifted at working with clients. Even though I have not yet taken a class from Theresa, I know much about her approach and philosophy because I have read and appreciated several chapters of her forthcoming book The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Play. Both she and Bonnie are well-grounded in the science that underlies what they practice and teach.

So if you want to enhance your ability to resolve disputes while having fun in a beautiful setting learning from two mindful experts, sign up here.

Note: To learn more benefits of play, go to some of my past posts: here, here, and here.

The same organization Dying Matters has announced a new creative writing competition. From the Web page:

Life is shockingly unpredictable and too often ends before we’ve told our nearest and dearest how much we love them, registered a will to avoid chaos after we’ve gone, visited a long-neglected relative or got in touch with someone we know we treated badly. Omissions like these gnaw at us now and are likely to be bitterly regretted when we face the final curtain.

So with that in mind, our new writing competition, While There’s Still Time, is aimed at generating shared experiences that will help more people set about putting things right, planning their future and getting the best from the rest of their life. Reading about other people’s setbacks, sadness and happiness helps us cope with our own ups and downs, and writing about experiences too painful to talk about can in itself generate a wonderful sense relief and release.

By talking more openly about end of life issues and taking actions such as writing a will, recording our funeral wishes, registering as an organ donor, planning our future care and sharing what we would want with our loved ones we can help to ensure that we all get the chance to live well until we die.

You only die once, so don’t leave it too late to make your wishes known or to provide support to those who need it.

To improve healthcare workers' job satisfaction and patient care, several physicians and aligned professionals are learning about and using narrative practices. For example, take a look at this article about two people in North Carolina who are teaching courses in Narrative Medicine. From "Stories heal at narrative medicine workshop" (Mountain Xpress):

“Not all patients are storytellers, but every patient has a story to tell,” says Dr. [Claire] Hicks, who believes that narrative medicine helps train us to listen, to empathize and to heal. During the workshop, Dr. Hicks shared insights from a physician’s perspective in her work with HIV patients in hospice and how writing enriches her capacity as caregiver. . . .

. . .

The importance of story is the driving force behind narrative medicine. “Ways to read story are ways to read life,” says [Professor Laura] Hope-Gill.

I have been convinced of the value of narrative practices for a long time, particularly as they increase the ability to be reflective. Therefore, I was excited when I read a message from Professor Anne Villella on a legal education listserv in response to my asking her what she meant by "narrative practices." (One of the courses she offers at Lewis and Clark Law School is on narrative practices). Here is what she wrote (posted with permission):

The idea of narrative practices that I mentioned in my post include many of those found in Narrative Medicine, which you mention. I have attended a 4-day Narrative Medicine workshop and read much of the scholarship on Narrative Medicine. Its impact on those in the healthcare field have been remarkable in terms of developing professional identity, compassion, a sense of affiliation, and, ultimately, patient care.

I believe similar practices can have similar results in the practice of law and representation of clients. And, I know that there are others out there who have incorporated narrative practices into their courses.(I would love to hear from others who have done this!)

Besides Narrative Medicine, there are other resources out there about narrative practices. The work of Gillie Bolton comes to mind--she facilitates workshops and has written extensively on

The Institute of Human Development & The Institute of Cognitive & Brain Sciences at UC Berkeley, The Philosophy + Literature Initiative at Stanford, and the College of Arts & Sciences at Ohio State University presents:

The Science of Story and Imagination

Perspectives from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and the Humanities

This symposium will bring together leading scholars in philosophy, literature, cognitive science, and neuroscience to explore the following questions: What is the role of imagination in human cognition? Why do we create stories? How does the ability to produce and understand stories develop in childhood? Why are we attracted to some stories and not others? How do stories draw on and affect our causal, counter-factual, and probabilistic learning mechanisms? How do they intersect with our capacities for filling gaps, for retaining and integrating information, and for entering the minds of others?

As I blogged about recently, well-chosen movies and movie clips can be used to start conversations on topics that may be difficult to broach, including relationship challenges and death-and-dying-related matters. Short readings can serve the same purpose.

Excerpts from the forthcoming book Final Chapters, reminded of the valuable function of appropriate readings for facilitating necessary but sometimes anxiety-producing conversations, those talks that can be terrifying, at least uncomfortable, easily deferred. Click through and read "Enhancing Dementia Recipe" (the middle piece); perhaps, as I was, you will be moved. Just a few words and yet a strong impact.

Short, well-written, even jarring, readings can motivate you to sit down and have a talk about the future, whether it be about your marriage, divorce, child-raising, or death. Readings can provoke talks with your family or with your clients. Read anything good lately?

Memoir and life story writing, genealogy and family-tree shaking, ethical wills and legacy leaving: All are very popular topics and processes today. Although writing about one's past can facilitate moving forward into the future, help one ascertain his or her most important values, and illuminate how and to whom to leave bequests (both tangible and intangible), the actual writing can be overwhelming.

And now let me leave the computer for a moment and scream! I had a whole blog post written about an alternative method for memorializing your life that can seem less paralyzing. I talked about the possible benefits, some variations, and what it would take for me to post mine on Facebook once it was created.

Then, on the last save, Typepad disappeared the whole thing except the first paragraph. So now I will just post the bare links. Also I will refrain from typing a choice swear word.

[C]reate 3 blocks that are then filled with the symbols of your life – childhood, teen and adult. You are also asked to do this in black and white for two reasons:

First, because it’s hard enough to tell your life story in three pictures, without having to deal with the complexities of color balancing and second, because black and white tends to give history authenticity (personal or otherwise.)